


Conversations in Cars

by Jalules



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Comedy, Fluff, Gen, M/M, slight mentions of death violence or otherwise upsetting things, typical night vale experiences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-21 04:09:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/895620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jalules/pseuds/Jalules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At exactly 10:30 AM, without prompting, for no apparent reason, each and every citizen files out of their homes and offices, straight to their cars, which they then start and, in a highly organized and unhurried fashion, drive to Main Street.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conversations in Cars

.

.

.

The streets of Night Vale are filled with cars today.

At exactly 10:30 AM, without prompting, for no apparent reason, each and every citizen files out of their homes and offices, straight to their cars, which they then start and, in a highly organized and unhurried fashion, drive to Main Street.

Once there, the foremost car, driven by one Teddy Williams, slows to a stop, once again, for no apparent reason.

The line of cars behind follow suit, each grinding to a halt without incident, with the exception of one pickup truck driven not by a human resident, but instead by a small but astonishingly well-trained collection of Yorkshire Terriers.

They had figured out how to start the car easily enough, but experience some trouble reaching the brake pedal, and ultimately rear end the sedan in front of them.

No one is seriously harmed.

Each car creeps forward, slightly forward, till they stop in turn, one by one, becoming lazy, rumbling floats in a motionless parade. Engines purr and groan and sputter in places, and the sidewalks on either side are empty.

The cars are full of irritable persons and animals and things, a chain of confusion and seeping patience, a chorus of grit teeth and automatic windows whirring up and up to lock in chilled, conditioned air, and down and down to banish stale, heavy heat.

There is no reason for the stall, and no destination in any one of the many minds, but still, the baffling vehicular inactivity creeps under the skin of Night Vale’s drivers, sets their nerves on edge so that they rattle in their teeth, click against the space between their jaw bones and their ears so that they must dislodge it, so that they must clear their throats and whistle and fiddle with their radios.

Their compulsions are a maddening itch.

One driver beeps their horn. Then another. And another. Soon the street is filled with the sound of car horns, a symphony of sharp tones that quickly fall to a rhythm. First the third car in line, then the fifth, then the nineteenth, and back to the third. These drivers are frustrated with the wait. They have places to go and people to see, though they cannot remember just what their plans for the day are.

The cars that honk between are random bursts of noise, their drivers striking the center of their steering wheels as if suddenly shocked. Each one experiences a cold jolt of panic, an imagined emergency, their pupils shrunk to pinpoints at the sight of horrifying near-accidents that simply are not there.

No one leaves their vehicles. They sit and they wait, and they fight the maddening itch and the breathtaking, terrible visions, and they honk their horns.

In each of the cars but one, there is at least one heartbeat.

In each of the cars, there is a conversation.

.

John Peters, the farmer, sits in the passenger seat of his wife’s sporty hybrid car, shuffling a small stack of paperwork in his lap, and considers fertilizer.

It is common knowledge that imaginary corn requires no added fertilizer, or even viable soil, to grow, but he likes to throw some down in the fields every now and then just to be safe.

He is contemplating the benefits of straying from routine and trying out a different brand than usual, as his wife leans on the horn beside him.

She curses a blue streak under her breath, and where such a display would have once brought a light into his eyes, a fire in his belly, these days it just barely catches his attention.

She is a spritely, bird-boned sort of thing, and when she makes a rude gesture out the window intended for the driver of the car behind them, it is with more gusto than one would expect from a woman of her appearance.

She was always elegant, he thinks, too elegant for a life of fields and fertilizer.

“We need to buy milk on the way home,” She says, her voice suddenly close and breaking through his thoughts, “Don’t let me forget.”

He makes a noncommittal noise. He shuffles the paperwork in his lap again.

He tries to keep his gaze from drifting down, from rereading words he has read several times already, first quickly, then slowly, agonizing over each syllable, making sure of the meaning.

Legal documents are confusing, and he has never been a very complex man.

He would hand them to his wife to read instead, (she has always been the brains of the operation,) but he does not have the heart to burden her with this. Also, he left them casually on the kitchen table last week, and she did not seem to be able to see them.

He looks out the window, at the heat haze along the edges of the road, and imagines thriving crops lining the sidewalk instead. He imagines corn, as far as the eye can see.

He has never been a very creative man, either.

He lets his gaze drift low, pull back to the stack of paperwork in his lap, which he shuffles carefully, till the topmost document displays the writing he has read the most times. It is the one that causes the most pain.

Mandatory court ordered divorces filed by vague yet menacing government agencies are confusing, and he does not want to think about them much.

To his left, his wife leans on the horn. She shouts obscenities into the rear view mirror, hate in her eyes as she questions the legitimacy of the birth of the driver behind them, and suggests a few places they could attempt to forcefully place the set of golf clubs resting on their side console.

She is captivatingly beautiful.

.

In the twenty first car down the road, there is a young woman gripping the steering wheel of her slightly shaking car. The car is older than she is by a few years, at least, and she is always sure that it is just going to fall to pieces in the middle of the road one day.

So far, it has not.

She uses the car, mostly, to drive to and from school, to and from work. Neither is a place she much enjoys being.

She does not honk her horn as many of the other drivers do, choosing instead to wait in relative silence. The radio is broken, and her phone battery has died.

She peers out at the car ahead, at the children lolling in its back seat, beneath the sun visor. She would fold it up for a better view of what lies ahead, but it is broken, like many things inside the car, and always falls back down.

She looks into the small mirror set inside the visor instead, and sighs.

The face within the mirror, a face that is not her own, frowns at her.

It is a woman, the face in the mirror, and one with very strong opinions. She always has things to say about her driving, or the people she allows to take up the extra seats inside her car.

Not very many people are willing to sit in the extra seats inside her car. This is mostly because of the extremely judgmental mirror, but also because the seatbelts there, like so many other things inside the car, are broken.

“You should have gone the back way,” The woman in the mirror tells her, and the driver nods, knowing it to be true.

“You probably shouldn’t have gone out at all, actually,” The woman in the mirror says, and the driver sighs again.

“You should have stayed home, like you were going to anyway. You don’t even have class today. What were you going to do? Go out for coffee? By yourself?”

The driver thinks, for just a moment, of tearing the visor, and subsequently the mirror, out of the car and flinging it violently into the road.

It is a nice thought, but then, what would she do when the sun was in her eyes?

The sun, unfortunately, due to her particular schedule and also a longstanding family curse, is always in her eyes.

“You might as well make coffee at home,” The woman in the mirror says, “Better than spending all that money on someone else’s coffee. It’s a waste, is what it is.”

The driver peers below the visor at the children in the car ahead. They make faces at her through the glass, and she does not make any back. The woman in the mirror tells her that she should have put more effort into her appearance today, just to show the world that she cares, and the driver sighs yet again.

Her spirit, like so many, many other things inside the car, is broken.

.

Old woman Josie does not drive. She never learned, in her youth, and she sees no need now that she is old. She walks to where she needs to be, usually, or flies, if the angels are in the mood.

She takes the bus, when she has to travel far, and it is on the bus that she is seated now, exactly four seats back from the driver, a stout man with a thick moustache and quite a lot of scars on the backs of his hands.

The angels fill a few of the seats behind her, and if not for them, the bus would be otherwise empty. Old woman Josie is the only person in Night Vale who rides the bus, and only once in a great while. But still, it always seems to come around to the stop at the corner of Mariposa and Rock Cress precisely when she needs it, and again, outside the ethnic foods store when her arms are full of groceries and she wishes to go home.

It has only taken her to the wrong place twice.

She does not know the bus driver’s name, only that the tag on his shirt reads ‘M.’ She does not address him by the single letter. She does not address him at all. Rather, he speaks to her, to the street and the idling car ahead, in a slow and heavy drawl, criticizing the quality of the roads in their town.

“Asphalt’s nicer out east,” He says, “Real workmanship, y’know? Lines are neat, too. None of this pentagram stuff.”

Then he honks the horn twice, in response to the car horn honking behind them, but only succeeds in upsetting the driver in front.

Old woman Josie nods along.

She tells him that when she was a girl, a smaller girl than now, a slender thing, she met a boy in the street once, late at night. They played hopscotch around the pentagrams, though they were much too old for that sort of thing.

They played chicken with the only truck to roll through town so late, and when it made to run them down, they took to the sidewalk and collapsed, laughing, in a heap.

She wore a coral colored skirt then, she says.

She had almost forgotten.

.

The truck full of Yorkshire Terriers is relatively quiet. They take turns yipping, while one concentrates on tapping the horn, briefly and intermittently, so as to appear still invested in the traffic situation, but not impolite.

One terrier, the one in the back seat, is not so interested in the conversation at hand. He is not one for conjecture about the cause of traffic incidences, but rather, the type to simply wait things out until the road is clear of the debris and mangled corpses that are sure to be gumming up the works.

He flips through a magazine while his canine compatriots chatter, learning all the latest sex tips to “Really Blow His Mind,” and “Fulfill His Every Fantasy.”

He interrupts, at one point, laughing, to share a quotation from the magazine that suggests sponge painting your man’s body with your edible-paint coated breasts.

The others don’t seem to appreciate his sense of humor. As soon as they have politely smiled and nodded in bewilderment, they return to the earlier discussion of traffic.

“Really guys, this stuff is hilarious,” He says, but they don’t seem to hear.

They rarely seem to hear.

He hides his muzzle in print pages, and fears that no one will ever understand him.

.

Precisely in the middle of the meaningless traffic jam, wearing a tie that has begun to feel slightly too tight, in a car that is just cool enough to be comfortable, is the voice of Night Vale.

Cecil drums the tips of his fingers against the steering wheel to the tune of _My Eyes Are Fully Open_ from the popular comic opera _The Pirates of Penzance_ by famous writer-composer duo, Gilbert and Sullivan.

He does not hum the song.

To his right, and, only a few feet away from the cause of the disruption, although they do not know it now and never, ever will, is Carlos, a scientist.

If Cecil is nervous, it is due to this man’s presence, and not at all due to the presence of a vague, shadowy mass lurking behind the nearest mailbox.

Cecil thinks that most vague, shadowy masses are largely misunderstood, and would probably benefit from organized community events and team building exercises. Perhaps if they were better socialized, they would not feel the need to lurk in dark places waiting to be noticed.

To his right, Carlos is looking impatient and, as always, slightly concerned.

“Cecil,” He says, and that alone is enough to keep Cecil calm. No matter the circumstance, no matter the danger, Carlos’ sweet voice saying his name will always be a soothing sound.

“Cecil,” He says again, because he received only a dazed, admiring stare the first time, “This isn’t right. This doesn’t make sense.”

He has been saying things like that since they got in the car. He says things like that a lot, actually, and if it weren’t so endearing, Cecil might consider telling him to chill out already. Carlos takes a lot of things much too seriously. He could probably use a vacation.

Cecil wonders if Carlos would consider taking a trip together. Nothing big, of course, just a weekend getaway sort of thing. Maybe to a bed and breakfast, or on one of those cruise to nowhere deals.

That’s kind of a big step though, and he doesn’t want to force things.

“I can’t see any reason for the backup,” Carlos says, “And they aren’t reporting anything about the traffic on the radio.”

To be fair, there usually isn’t any traffic to report, and when there is, it is Cecil’s job to do so. Emergency traffic reports could potentially be filed during a different show’s time slot, he supposes, but clearly no one is in a big hurry to do so.

Right now the _Small, Precious Objects Sinking Slowly Into Dark, Stagnant Water_ , show is in full swing. It would be rude to interrupt for anything less than a complete catastrophe.

Cecil assumes everything is fine.

“Everyone is just sitting,” Carlos continues, and looks to the left, then to the right, for probably the fifteenth time, as though another glance at the same view could illuminate the problem, “And what for? Why did we even get _into_ the car, Cecil? Where were we going?”

He raises a valid point, the whole not being able to remember the thoughts that drove them to action thing, but Cecil shrugs and offers that there is nothing wrong with simply going for a drive. No one really does that any more, considering the cost of gas and concerns about pollution and the fast paced lifestyle that has taken hold these days.

Still, he says, it’s nice to just take a drive now and then. Not to get anywhere, just to get out. And you know, if you find an interesting spot along the way, even better. That’s how you discover ice cream shops you never knew about, or burial sites you were never _supposed_ to know about.

It can be fun, he says, taking off without a plan sometimes. Sort of romantic.

Carlos stares, his perfect brow furrowed. Cecil beams at him.

“This isn’t exactly a drive through the country,” He says, and he sounds unhappy, which makes Cecil unhappy, which makes Carlos realize that perhaps he is coming across the wrong way.

He immediately corrects himself, stuttering slightly as he speaks, “That- that is. Not that I don’t enjoy spending time with you. Trapped in a car or otherwise.”

Cecil sighs, content. Indefinite confinement has never sounded so appealing.

“But not knowing what’s going on outside, or what’s causing it…I’m a scientist, Cecil, I’m supposed to be figuring these things out!”

Cecil nods, trying to be understanding.

“Maybe if I just…” Carlos muses, and looks to the passenger side window, “Cecil, stay here.”

Cecil explains that he wasn’t planning on going anywhere, even if he could compel his limbs to cooperate in maneuvering the car, or simply getting out of his seat, but that Carlos’ obvious concern is touching.

He watches Carlos open the passenger side door and lean out, still half-held by his seat belt, and swallows the dark pit of worry that has worked itself into his throat.

He is sure that everything is fine, but just in case, he wants to be prepared for the worst.

He tries not to think about the possibility of Carlos being nearly killed in the line of duty again.

He fails that, and feels a sinking sense of dread.

He sort of wishes he had a desk to hide under.

He sort of wishes Carlos would stop trying to understand things for a little while and maybe use this time for more constructive activities, like holding his hand almost-too-tightly and kissing as much is allowed publicly between the hours of 10 and 2 on weekends and holidays.

“I still don’t see anything that-“ Carlos begins to say, but a dull buzzing sound erupts before he can continue. All honking stops, drowned out by a noise like a thousand cicadas dropped into an enormous metal bowl.

The sound grows louder and louder till it is deafening, shaking the very furthest teeth in Cecil’s mouth, the bones in his chest, but not the frame of the car around them.

Something moves past like a rush of wind, quick and controlled, and slams the passenger side door shut once more. Carlos is slammed along with it, right back into his seat, with his shoulder pressed against the window and his lab coat slightly askew.

The buzzing noise stops, quite suddenly. The thing like wind is gone.

Carlos makes a slight, pained sound, and Cecil hovers, concerned, as close as his seat belt will allow.

“Well,” Carlos says, and he winces as he sits upright, “I guess we’ll just. Wait it out.”

He rubs at his shoulder, where a bruise is forming, although he does not know it yet, but later most certainly will, and sighs heavily.

Cecil puts an arm around him, light so as not to hurt, and they lean in against each other across the console.

The chorus of car horns starts up again, first the third car, then the fifth, then the nineteenth, and back to the third.

Though he is otherwise perfectly comfortable, and no longer even slightly nervous, Cecil’s tie still feels slightly too tight.

Carlos does him the favor of loosening it, as they work in a few moments of legal and perfectly acceptable public displays of affection.

.

Somewhere around noon, the traffic clears up. 


End file.
